Kudos

Heather Hubeny, Employee Assistance Program coordinator, was awarded a full scholarship to attend the International Association of Employee Assistance Professionals in Education (IAEAPE) annual conference in Boulder, Colo., in October. This year’s conference, titiled “Continuing the Climb During Turbulent Times: Enhancing Our Ability to Serve Our Institutions,” will include workshops on workplace violence, suicide prevention, conflict resolution and veterans’ issues, among other timely topics of interest.

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, assistant professor of English, has been awarded a fellowship from the Cornell Society for the Humanities for 2011-2012. Her research focus is: “Sound, Culture, Theory, Practice, Politics.” She also has two publications coming out in the fall: “Reproducing Citizenship in Blackboard Jungle: Race, the Cold War, and the Tape Recorder” in the September 2011 issue of American Quarterly and “The Word and the Sound: The Sonic Color-line and Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative” in Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience.

The spring edition of Binghamton Research received a Grand Award for one-of-a-kind publications in the annual Apex Awards for Publication Excellence, a national competition organized by Communications Concepts. The magazine is edited by Rachel Coker, director of research advancement at Binghamton University, and designed by Martha Terry, creative services manager. Terry was also honored with an Award of Excellence for design and layout of the same issue. Read the magazine online at http://go.binghamton.edu/spring11.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), an association within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), awarded the 2010-2011 CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence to the State University of New York at Binghamton First-Year Writing program. The honor was awarded following a self-study prepared by Kelly Kinney, director of the University’s First-Year Writing and the Writing Initiative; Mark Brantner, a former visiting assistant professor; and Kristi Murray Costello, associate director of First-Year Writing. The Selection Committee noted that Binghamton University is the model of an aspiring and growing program whose delivery of First-Year Writing is theoretically informed and supports best practices in writing instruction. The Committee noted that the program offers a fair amount of professional development, demonstrates imaginative solutions and best practices with thorough assessment, offers an enviable class size, and serves obviously diverse populations.

Hiroki Sayama, assistant professor of bioengineering and Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, was invited as a guest scientist to the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany, from July 23-Aug. 6. He collaborated with scientists at the Institute on research projects on complex adaptive networks. Two of his graduate students also accompanied him and engaged in research projects. Their travels were financially supported by the Office of International Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. In August, a poster presentation by Sayama and bioengineering undergraduate student Chun Wong, titled “Quantifying Evolutionary Dynamics of Swarm Chemistry” (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262297140chap110.pdf), won the Best Poster Award at the Eleventh European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL’11) held in Paris. Sayama’s poster was selected best by the audience’s votes out of 54 posters.